FOCUS conclusions for future Security Research (draft workspace)
This very first draft text is based on mid-term FOCUS results. It will be changed and elaborated to reflect the FOCUS reference scenarios and their further assessment.
Future EU security research should broadly reflect the evolving common European security agenda in order to timely address emerging prior gaps and needs for further implementation of security strategies.
Future EU security research should meet the challenge to develop a new concept of (civil) security from research, rather than deriving it from events, technologies, or existing policies.
Future EU security research should clearly address the risk of creating an uneven distribution of security in society, for example by technologies that only add to the security of the wealthy, or by security solutions that even may harm certain parts of society.
Also in this regard, future EU security research should place emphasis on and help promote the principle of societal/citizen ownership (seeing citizens as the final/ultimate end-users). This will be of increased importance for the ethical acceptability as well as the factual public acceptance of its results.
Future EU security research should contribute to developing and implementing norms and standards for civil protection that support the EU as a collective civil protection actor and a related concept of security.
Future EU security research should focus still more strongly on public perceptions and on citizen security cultures, including new social media research to gain indicators for those concepts.
Future EU security research should among other things particularly address social media communications technologies and contribute to better connecting to public/civil society audiences and better enabling policymakers to communicate to the latter on civil emergency.
This very first draft text is based on mid-term FOCUS results. It will be changed and elaborated to reflect the FOCUS reference scenarios and their further assessment.